Art as Commercial Propaganda:

Mona Lisa Through the Ages Part IV

Ó Dr. Tina Yarborough, Asst. Professor of Art History & Interdisciplinary Studies

Georgia College & State University

To begin our journey I will start with a recent image that comments on the issues of originality and reproduction: in Double Mona Lisa with Self-portrait, from 1985-88 the identical twin brothers Mike and Doug Starn borrow the image or appropriate it by using a photograph that documents the painting. On a trip to Paris, the Starns took a picture of the Mona Lisa surrounded by its large, cumbersome case, with the rest of the gallery and its visitors, including the two artists themselves, reflected in the glass. They have enormously enlarged their photograph to nearly 9 X 13 feet and made it into a toned silver print; they have then created a large-scale photocollage by cutting up the image and remaking the photo with a patchwork grid of scotch-taped panels to show that the display of the Mona Lisa has the ironic effect of distancing the work from the very people who have come to experience it first hand. In place of an original that is thus remote and out of reach, the photocollage substitutes its own complex aesthetic structure for that of the Mona Lisa. The painstakingly reconstituted version that the Starns create is obviously a homemade, "constructed" copy—totally at odds with the mystique of the original. And as a further comment on the issues of originality and reproduction, the Starns double Leonardo’s famous image, making a twin of it like the two artists reflected in the glass (Arnason & Prather, 714-15).

The bullet-proof glass case that now houses the Mona Lisa actually began as a simple glass pane that was added sometime around 1910 to prevent vandalism; other valuable paintings in the Louvre collection were then also put under glass. The new glass panes were furiously denounced as vulgar shopwindows, mirrors, and as a general affront to French good taste. Ironically, and despite the new protective glass, in August 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen, igniting the wildest Mona mania yet.

copyright © Dr. Deborah Vess 1998-2001, Georgia College & State University and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. All rights reserved. Rights to chapters authored by contributing faculty members reserved to Georgia College & State University, to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at GC&SU, and to the individual faculty authors.